Town Square

Housing report: City is 'jobs rich'

Original post made
on Apr 23, 2009

Every seven years, Mountain View residents have a chance to significantly change the direction of the city's housing policies, a process called "re-visioning" the General Plan's housing element. And if controversies over the past few years are any indication, the upcoming re-visioning should be a big deal.

Posted by Steve Dodge
a resident of Jackson Park
on Apr 25, 2009 at 8:56 am

Jobs rich? What a joke. Maybe if you are a white collar worker in some software company (something we have too many of) then you are fine, but otherwise the job situation is horrible. A minmum wage position at Walmant is no subsitute for what we have lost.

Everyone I know who lives in M.V. their whole lives have lost their jobs in the last decade, and most ended up having to move away to other towns/cities to find work. Only one remains, besides myself.

Stop with approving all the office buildings and ultra-condensed housing and set-up some real industry for a change, so that we high-school grads with natural technical and mechnical skills can make a decent living again. We aren't all pencil-pushers and keyboard-thumpers.

And stop turning precious industrial land into more apartments and shoe-box homes. We have enough of the latter and so little of the former these days.

This is Mountain View, not "yuppy-ville". Please bring back my home town.

Posted by mj
a resident of another community
on Apr 25, 2009 at 3:43 pm

Steve, its only going to get worse. The city is caving to pressure from developers to change the zoning on Old Middlefield, the one place where blue-collar service companies can still go in town. Soon, more high price office space there, and no more good working class jobs in Mountain View.

Supposedly theyre trying to do this change outside of the general plan so nobody notices. They're only telling building owners on the street, not the people in town who will lose services or have jobs leave town

Posted by Michael
a resident of Shoreline West
on Apr 26, 2009 at 12:19 pm

For as long as I knew it, Mountain View was a "bedroom community" like Palo Alto. Palo Alto and Mountain View have changed, but there are still far more jobs outside of these cities than within their limits. While neither is a Lagos, Nigeria or Muqdisho, Somalia, most people would agree that the quality of life for working people has not improved over the past eight years. I, for one, am looking at moving away from here due to the high cost of living and diminished career opportunities. It will always be a destination for those who think that they can afford it. To accomodate such an influx, Mountain View will be forced to change just as it has changed in the past 50 years. Such is life.

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